


The Casual Creation of Monsters for Enthusiasts and Beginners

by sexonastick



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sexonastick/pseuds/sexonastick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Making monsters is easy. Just add water.</p>
<p>Care and maintenance is a lot trickier. No handbook available. Process still evolving.</p>
<p>Warning: Ghost Drifting may occur. Also, feelings.</p>
<p>Danger, danger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Probably wouldn't have posted without [lescousinsdangereux](http://www.fanfiction.net/~lescousinsdangereux) pestering and supporting. Thanks, dude.

*

_all night, all I hear, all I hear is your heart?_  
 _how come? how come?_

*

Work on Jaeger repair is hard.

It's dangerous. 

They're the size of small skyscrapers and made of solid metal. Lumbering. A mountain on two legs. A building with an engine. Meant to be invincible.

But sometimes the Kaiju tear through them like flimsy paper dolls.

Repair is hard. You feel like it's never ending. Another beast goes down, and it's back to the shop for the rig while the pilots get to sleep. They get to drink. 

They celebrate.

Repair is always hard, even on the days where it doesn't feel endless. It's choking on fumes and fighting fatigue. One mistake, and you risk hundreds of thousands of lives.

But work as a pilot means the lives of millions. Countless expectations. 

Not just fame: infamy. 

They are all going to die. Some sooner than others. That much is obvious now.

Better to go out in a blazing ball of glory.

*

Thoughts like that should have probably kept Beca Mitchell out of the Jaeger program all together.

She couldn't really tell you why they let her through.

Unless it was persistence. Passion.

Or maybe because her sparring partner the third time she tried out couldn't take her eyes off Beca.

(It's okay. Beca couldn't stop staring at her either.)

*

They had tied. Five to five.  Compatibility rating of 93% -- about two percent higher than the average team starting out.

Pentecost didn't exactly look impressed, but he _looked_. He looked long and hard.

Something about the way he carried himself -- maybe in the shoulders -- made that feel like it was really enough.

*

Chloe Beale, originally from Florida.

She wore more layers than anyone else and still shivered into the fur lining at the front of her coat.

Beca smiled and pulled it tighter, adjusting the buttons for her. (Chloe had on extra thick gloves, which made it harder.)

"Your hands," she said, frowning, and scooped both Beca's (red) hands up in her own. 

To warm them.

(And it did. Starting somewhere in the center of Beca's chest, she felt warm.)

"I'm fine," she lied.

"You don't have to do that." Chloe Beale (from Florida) had a smile like a sunset to go along with her flaming red hair. "I'll be in your head soon. No more secrets."

*

Which maybe could be a relief.

Chloe had a way of smiling at you like she had a secret and -- for some reason she couldn't explain, definitely never articulate -- Beca wanted to _know_.

She wanted to know everything about Chloe Beale.

*

That should have been the first sign. (It was, but she ignored it.)

Emotions are dangerous.

More than fighting giant inter-dimensional monsters that come from the ocean floor or the risk of falling from a repair rig and never getting back up again, _emotions_ are a threat.

They make you weak. They make you impulsive.

They're a great big warning sign that you're doing something wrong.

So run. 

Run far away.

*

Beca almost quit the program the first day they attempted the neural handshake. 

The very first time you try, it's supposed to be a safe learning environment with someone that you trust.

That's what Drifting is, at its core: trust shared between two people.

Along with every impulse and memory you've ever had.

So she plugged into Chloe's neural pathways, loaded directly into her brain. Beca didn't _hear_ the other girl's thoughts. She knew them.

Became them.

She could _feel_ Chloe there, like a second body under -- and over -- her skin.

There was a prickling sense of something _deep_ (aching) like sympathy all mixed up with attraction. Chloe looked at her -- at Beca -- and it was like looking at herself at the same time.

An almost endless loop of concern undercut by arousal and --

Something.

They unplugged and Beca gasped like a drowning person brought back to land.

She got up on shaky legs and made her way down the hallway.

Toward the exit, and fresh (cold) air.

*

She had even _tried_ to quit.

But Pentecost wouldn't hear of it.

"This is normal," he'd said. "Part of the process." 

The almost bored look he shot up at her from behind his desk made Beca feel a certain obligation to straighten her posture.

Grip hands behind her back.

(Was she crazy, or did he just smile slightly?)

"Give it a few more days," he'd said. (Definitely smiling.) "See where things end up."

*

But it didn't take a few more days.

Chloe's mouth was on Beca's when she got back to her bunk. 

Hands in her hair and fingers fitting under shirts -- lifting them off, quickly -- and then Chloe had her pinned in bed. Chloe had her hands under ( _inside_ ) of Beca, and Chloe's voice was in her ear.

(But not in her head.) 

"You could have asked anytime," she said, breathing hot air against Beca's exposed collarbone. 

*

But no. 

No, she couldn't.

And Chloe knew that too. Now she knew everything.

(Beca wouldn't _have_ to ask. Not anymore.)

*

Chloe was concerned, but only quietly. She was sympathetic without being pitying.

Because she knew (she _knew_ ) that the last thing Beca would want was her pity.

Anyone's pity.

She had worked hard to get here. Earned it.

Walked through the fires and came out as something new.

*

Everyone would remember San Francisco.

K-Day. First contact.

Even the cities that followed. 

Manila. Cabo. 

They would be memorialized forever for the destruction on a mass scale. The early days of terror. The countless loss of life.

Few people still remembered the cities that followed. When the attacks grew more frequent -- common place -- but far before the Jaegers were up to the standard they would eventually reach.

When cities were still nearly leveled in the conflict. 

Because at least now we had our heroes. Some magic ideal to strive for -- even if they fell short in so many ways. We didn't have to talk about that. (We didn't _want_ to.)

Not the ruined homes and broken bodies. 

Jaeger means _Hunter_ and the Kaiju were the prey. 

But our cities were their hunting ground. 

(Were and are.)

And we are merely the casualties of war. The underbrush crushed beneath a metal foot.

Who cries over broken blades of grass?

*

But Beca will always remember that day.

Parts of it, at least.

It's a strange mishmash of detail and confusion.

She doesn't remember, for example, why the TV was on. She almost never watched it; it was always just a distraction in the background.

She does remember that her dad had insisted that she join them in the living room, but she had refused to take her headphones off or quit the mix she had going on her laptop.

Maybe Sheila had turned it on.

Probably.

A soap opera or talk show. A game show with flashing lights.

Then the news cut in. 

Solemn faces and the now familiar bar graphs tracking property damage.

No estimate on fatalities yet as they watched Portland turn to ash.

*

Downbeats, snares, and drops turned to static in her ears. Noise.

Just fucking noise.

*

She never touched music again.

* 

At her mother's funeral, Beca stood off to the side. 

She watched as Dr. Mitchell, her father, looped his arm around Sheila and thought about pushing the two of them into the pit to be buried along with the former Mrs. Mitchell. 

It would have been fitting.

The priest said a few quick words and crossed himself. Beca was never really Catholic -- certainly never devout at anything -- but her mother had been. She tried to mime the sign of the cross but gave up partway through.

No one noticed.

The service had already ended.

Another eighty funerals to attend on that day alone.

Freshly dug graves all lined up like an assembly line, but what was the end result?

What the hell were they building toward?

*

People say things like, _"the road to progress."_ They say there is a cost for our future. There is a cost for humanity's continued existence on planet earth.

They never bother to mention that it's almost all paid in blood, but Beca knows.

She knows that now.

*

They were all supposed to die there together. 

In that house in Portland where Beca had grown up. The one with the overgrown backyard and the busted swingset. She'd snapped the chain from swinging too hard and split her lip in the process. No stitches, but a wicked bruise for weeks.

Beca's goldfish was buried in the flower bed, and her name was carved into a door frame in the basement, just at the eye level of her twelve year old self.

All her photos -- all their memories of that time when they were still a family -- were on mom's computer. Crushed on impact, just like she was.

Irreparable damage. 

*

Closed casket funeral.

"She's in a better place," someone (everyone) had said, with their hand reaching toward Beca's shoulder -- but missing when she pulled away.

*

Of _course_ she was.

Everywhere was better than here.

*

Catholics (the devout kind) think of Hell as an actual place. Literal.

Not a metaphor at all.

You can go there. You can stand in it.

They'd always imagined it was below the rocks, but who's to say it's not the other way around?

Maybe these things that came from the ocean floor think this place -- our whole fucking planet -- is _their_ Hell.

Maybe they'd hate to be proven wrong.

*

After the buildings collapsed, the fires started. Gas lines snapped and then lit up. 

Their house burned for hours, and the pictures on the walls melted. Fused together, memories overlapping. Faces bubbling. 

Bursting.

All that's left now is what's inside their heads.

*

Walk through the fire, and what comes out the other side is never quite the same. Maybe not always disfigured, but changed.

Rebuilt.

*

It wasn't pity from Chloe, but understanding. 

She didn't hold too tight, but her hugs were strong, and they lasted. She'd only let go when you pulled away first. 

That was the thing about Chloe. She _never_ pulled away first.

*

"You shouldn't worry," she said, unnecessarily. 

Beca already knew that's how she felt.

But sometimes Chloe liked to make her point aloud -- with words, and a gentle smile. "We're doing great together."

But the first round of cuts were approaching, and Beca did worry.

She had been cited for reckless behavior. Erratic decision making.

Not the two of them as a team -- just Beca. Chloe had tried to resist. She had _tried_ to obey orders, but in the end she conceded to her partner's will.

Co-pilots are co-dependents. They cannot fight or resist each other for long. 

It was Beca's fault. They both knew that.

Everyone knew that. 

Just the other day, Ranger Posen had approached them in the meal hall and offered unsolicited advice. "Maybe if you spent a little _more_ time studying tactics and less time _shacking up_ you wouldn't be having this problem."

She had no right to criticize. She and her partner were scoring dangerously low. 

They would obviously be cut. 

Posen was too uptight and controlled, and her body had begun to resist the neural drift. She was incompatible with most people -- maybe anyone. The point is trust, and she didn't have a lot.

(But then, neither did Beca.)

She had been ready to tell Posen as much (to say _all_ of it), even leaning forward in her chair, when Chloe put a restraining hand on her elbow.

Gentle. Quiet. 

"We appreciate the advice, Aubrey, but it's not necessary."

Beca thought (again) about sending her fist through Posen's (hard headed) skull, and started tensing. And Chloe squeezed.

Again.

Maybe the neural bond was beginning to work outside the machine.

"Thanks, Aubrey." This time the squeeze was more like a gentle touch, stroking down the inside of the arm where Beca's nerves were especially sensitive. 

Almost ticklish.

*

Chloe knew all those things too.

After the first time they fucked--

( _Made love?_ Chloe's voice had suggested between their minds, and Beca had snorted in a way that was infinitely fond. More affectionate than she would like for a first casual sexual encounter. 

Because that's what this was. Casual.

_No,_ Chloe's voice again, inside Beca's brain and body. Encircling. Running over every inch. _It's not that._

No. Not that.

Not casual at all.

_Fucked for HOURS,_ Beca thought back, and offered a few quick visual reminders in the form of intense memories. Fantasies.)

\-- they knew everything about each other the next time they strapped in.

Everything the other had liked -- disliked, though there weren't many there -- and all the best places to get a response.

Maybe it was cheating. It occurred to Beca to think so -- to wound her pride, a little, to have everything handed to her so easily -- but it didn't matter.

It was so fucking fantastic.

*

( _Watch your mouth in my head,_ Chloe would tease, gently, and project an image -- a vivid _memory_ \-- of fingers sliding over Beca's mouth, slipping in between her lips.)

"Rangers," came a voice from the coms outside their head, impatient -- repeating itself? -- and piercing. "Repeat: initialize training protocol three."

"Roger."

Beca wondered if command could hear that breathless quality in Chloe's voice.

Or was that only in the Drift?

( _Stop getting me into trouble,_ she whispered back, just a low and teasing chuckle settling in at the back of Chloe's mind. Like an elbow lightly prodding.

_Shut up,_ Chloe thought in the midst of a wave of command tactics and procedures.

Beca slipped inside the routine, easy as settling her hips astride her copilot's and leaning into a slow but steady thrust. Simple. Basic.

Thrilling every time.

_Make me,_ she thought back, forcefully, and could almost purr when the response came, loud and clear -- almost a warning, but one that turned her stomach to liquid metal.

_Later._

And then static at the pleasure centers of their shared connection. An empty sense of wanting.

Low burning hunger. To be satisfied at a later date.

For now, there were drills. And a couple million dollars worth of machine.)

*

"Good job, rangers." 

The same scratchy voice from the coms, forty-three minutes later. 

The only feedback apart from the feeling of Chloe's heavy breathing inside Beca's head. (Sinking low and almost into her chest.)

"Excellent work."

*  
But _good_ wasn't enough, and excellent wasn't even really _good_. 

What they wanted (needed) from their pilots was perfection.

And Beca Mitchell was anything but perfect.

*

"I'm sorry," Chloe said for the third time.

Aloud.

They would have to speak aloud from now on. 

Not that there would be a now for _them_.

Beca was leaving. Bags packed. Cut from the program.

Not the team. 

Just Beca.

"Who's your new co-pilot?" she asked, without raising her eyes.

She was vaguely aware of her own consciousness reaching out. 

Straining to pluck the answer from Chloe's mind.

Better to sense it than hear those words in the quiet voice that Chloe used when they would lie in bed together. 

Like now, just a whisper, saying, "Aubrey."

Posen.

Beca zipped the bag and slung it across her shoulder. 

"Beca--"

If the voice had been inside her head, she would have stopped. She would have frozen. Compelled by something at the very center of herself, but words spoken aloud are so fragile.

So small. 

Like those two months with Chloe in her brain (and in her bed).

Easily ignored.

Gone in an instant.


	2. Chapter 2

Beca stays in Alaska. 

She couldn't necessarily say why. It's not that it's the best idea. 

Maybe it's her only idea.

*

(It's not about Chloe, she's sure. The Jaeger training program lasts only a few more months, and then the chosen few will be deployed across the length of the Pacific.)

*

She gets a job on a seiner rig, and isn't really sure why they hire her at all. Everyone else is bigger and stronger. 

It could be she's angrier. She has conviction. Determination is almost a commodity now. 

So many people have started giving up.

*

Especially here, at the edge of the world, it's almost easy to wonder what the point is.

*

( _Hope._

Chloe would have said that it was _hope_.

Sometimes Beca can still hear her. A vague murmur in her head. An itch that she can't reach.

Like how sometimes she hears the remnants of a beat. Static sounds almost like music, worming inside her ear canal. 

She focuses on something else. The waves and rigging. The sounds of the fish thrashing on deck.

And like that, it's gone.)

*

She's with Jesse because it's easy. He's easy. His hands are firm and worn in all the right ways -- strong, solid -- but his smile is gentle and he doesn't press for long.

He thinks that he _wants_ to know. Everything about her. Everything she was before they shared a ship and a bunk, but he doesn't.

So he concedes with just a few kisses. 

He's easy, and he's here.

*

Chloe is in Seattle.

Beca knows because she sees the broadcasts some nights when they're docked instead of out there on the ocean.

Not just Chloe. Aubrey too. They're a team.

They drive a Mark IV, fully digital weapons system. Dual thrusters in each foot for added lift. 

Thermal insolation around a hydraulic core. Big words, Beca thinks, and even bigger guns, with a fist the size of her old home back in Portland. (The one she watched turn to ash.)

Shiny and still new looking, like Aubrey's afraid to scratch the paint.

Broader than most of the others.

They called it _Vengeful Kraken_.

*

("Shoulder room," Chloe had said (aloud) when she and Beca stood side-by-side in the Shatterdome, looking up at the Jaeger under construction.

They had assumed they would ride in it together. Their Jaeger.

Beca had thought -- to herself, never aloud -- that she wouldn't really care if there wasn't so much room.

She didn't really mind being pressed in tight when the other person was Chloe.)

*

They look good on the news. (They look good together.)

Aubrey talks only in soundbites. She smiles in all the right places. Chloe stands beside her -- or sometimes slightly behind -- and never misses a beat, chiming in at all the right moments.

She's an agreeable Greek chorus, echoing Aubrey's every "we can" and "stop at nothing."

They are exactly what the PPDC need as good PR -- successful without being as showy as that jerk-off from Australia.

They're everything Aubrey has probably been practicing her whole life to be.

*

Beca tries not to resent it. 

She really does.

*

(Some nights, she's almost successful.)

*

She chose fish -- although it might be more accurate to say that fish chose her -- because people will always need to eat. Even at the end of the world, people need to eat, up until the very moment that they're eaten.

Except that maybe this isn't the end.

"We're winning," Jesse says aloud, with his arm slung low across Beca's waist and the radio on in the background. 

He might be speaking directly to her, or maybe to the world at large -- the heavy weight of helplessness that settles in sometimes at night when you're out there on the ocean, waiting for the moment something might rise up from the water to break their ship apart against its leathery hide.

Either way, nobody answers except for the steady crackle of the announcer on the radio, running through the news.

The report mentions Hong Kong and Auckland. Supplies shipping in to Jambi City, and a police task force headed to Vancouver.

Money trickling in from the North American east coast to the west. Support from families and loved ones living afar.

Practice drills in Seattle.

_Vengeful Kraken_ is a crowd favorite, and so are its pilots. 

Even if Posen's voice across the airwaves is as piercing and shrill as it is in person. 

"We all give what we can," she says, sounding like something you'd expect to see on a bumper sticker. 

(Sometimes there's Chloe's voice too. Quieter, more subdued, but with the slight creep of a smile still audible, even across all those miles. 

Or is that just the hint of her presence still stuck inside Beca's head?

Is some part of her still hiding there -- somewhere?)

But not tonight.

After Aubrey, the news has ended.

*

Beca lasts all of a song and a half before asking Jesse to shut it off. He grumbles, but she kisses his throat a few times -- rough with the beginnings of the beard that always starts to grow in once they're at sea -- and he quiets down. 

Easy. (Meaningless.)

*

Her first night outside the Shatterdome, Beca dreams of Chloe.

The kind of loud and vivid dreams they would often have together after sex.

Or sometimes even curled up close and fully clothed, breathing in time with each other, and suddenly she's unsure if it's Chloe's voice in her ear or in her head. Like Drifting and dreaming all in one.

The ghost of their connection.

(The dream is loud and so is Chloe's voice, saying, _"Beca,"_ over and over. First pleading, almost sad, but then lifting. Higher.

Heavier.

But still pleading.

Beca's kneeling on the grating of the platform of their Jaeger cockpit. It's sharp and cool against her knees, even through the layer of fabric that isn't really there; _she_ isn't really there, and neither is Chloe. 

Even though she's wet against Beca's tongue as she arches, saying _Beca_ and now they're in bed together. One hand inside Chloe, the other braced against her hip. 

Catching sighs against her tongue and curling it even as her fingers curl inside.

Feel the way the syllables tremble when the rest of Chloe does too.

_Beca_.)

*

The next night she heads out to a bar instead of falling asleep in her hotel room.

*

He offers her a beer and a seat at his table. He offers her his smile.

Jesse's smile comes easily to him. There is an _ease_ in his posture and his presence. He is at home here.

He still has a place that he calls home, and it's so strange to realize that.

All the more so once he tells her what he does for a living.

*

There is space in his bed and apparently on his boat, too. They're setting out into the ocean again by end of week. Beca has that long to decide.

But she doesn't need it.

Lying in bed with Jesse, she feels Chloe's voice -- the ghost of her _hands_ \-- creeping up on her again. (The _weight_ of her at Beca's back, breathing out against her hair.)

He's asleep, but it doesn't take much to massage him back into alertness. The small quirk of his lips is confused but appreciative. He gives way (easily) when Beca kisses him first and shifts on top.

She's awake now (fully), and the feeling recedes.

(Chloe's voice is gone.)

*

It doesn't take all week to decide after all.

It doesn't even take her a night.

* 

Beca is small, and a greenhorn too. 

It means she might as well be fish bait herself. 

She can't haul the net alone. She can't dump it over or run the crank.

But she can repair nets below deck, and she mans the rail alright. 

It's one of the most dangerous jobs on deck, but she doesn't complain. 

She's grateful for work, they think.

(If you can call her quiet, closed off expression -- the tightness growing inside her chest -- gratitude. That's probably not the right word at all.)

*

She's lean and a little bit mean -- can't be left alone with the oven range -- but she's good in a pinch or when tossed in heavy seas. When the boat rocks beneath them, so that you can almost feel the wood sliding out from under your feet, and the ocean slams against the rail like a fist battering the vessel -- trying to snatch at the humans on board -- she doesn't show any fear.

_It's like being inside a Jaeger._

The thought forms in her mind, full and heavy. Ripe as a fruit. Something to be shared between two people. Snatched from the stem of one brain and slipped inside another.

It leaves her almost limp and lifeless -- more staggering than the rocking of the waves.

*

Things they don't tell you about piloting a Jaeger before you start the program: 

        1. Trust is the most important thing. Without it, you will fail.

        2. After trust comes understanding. Of your co-pilot, but also yourself. You will know  
        new parts of you -- even if you don't want to.

        3. The way you think starts to change. Not just images and impulses, but fully formed  
        ideas that come as word and image joined together as one. They get sharper. Deeper.

        4. Everything changes. In the world and inside yourself.

        5. It doesn't change back. Even when the echoing emptiness left by the lack of the  
        Drift becomes the norm.

*

(Chloe's voice goes away, but the hole where it used to sit inside Beca's brain remains empty. Like an infection.

Hollowed out and aching.)

*

She learns to gut fish with precision, but she'll never be as good at it as Lilly, whose skill with a knife is almost worrying. Nobody really seems to have asked her _where_ she learned to take anything apart so completely. 

Because Lilly seems to frighten a lot of the crew. She's quiet in a way that's genuinely hard to hear above the swell of the waves sometimes -- a lot of the time -- and her smiles don't completely reach her eyes.

But neither do Beca's. Not anymore.

When she bothers to smile at all.

*

She appreciates that kind of honesty.

Lilly is really the only person she's totally comfortable having on deck beside her when the waves start reaching over the rail, threatening to drag them under.

Once or twice, it comes close.

*

One time in particular, Beca's left clinging to the rail with only one arm -- the other ripped loose by the force of the wave -- soaked through and shivering in the cold. 

They pull her below deck and rip her from the damp clothing, shoved down instead into layers and layers of warmth that's sealed up all around her.

Lilly hums to herself and zips Beca in tight while Jesse just looks worried.

It's the same look he wears when he asks about home and she immediately changes the subject. Like there's one small part of him left with self-preservation instincts, wondering what he got himself into.

*

But he sits beside her all night long anyway, keeping her awake with pointless stories from his past until her body temperature rises and it feels safe to sleep again.

*

(She doesn't wake for nearly ten hours, and all her dreams are about drowning with Chloe, joined hands slowly turning blue together.)

*

When they're docked, she misses the water and out there she misses the land. 

Nothing feels like home anymore except for the vague sense of dissatisfaction that follows wherever she goes. 

But at least that's something. At least it's filling.

The space that Chloe used to occupy inside her head and heart is still sore (and empty), but that doesn't keep her from pressing against it. 

Like the bad habit of running your tongue over the place where a missing tooth once was.

*

It's a vivid memory, but it isn't hers. 

Because that's Chloe asking her mom about the tooth fairy and giggling the next morning, but still worrying the wound with the very tip of her tongue. 

It hasn't healed. She wonders if it ever will.

(It does. Beca has tasted deep inside Chloe's mouth. She knows her insides _really_ well.) 

*

Sometimes the things from Chloe's childhood feel even more real than her own.

*

It's not as if Beca knows _everything_ , but she feels certain moments -- birthdays, learning to drive, and even the first kiss -- as if she had lived them alongside Chloe.

Inside Chloe.

When she first left the program -- when she was thrown out -- Beca spent a lot of time going back over them in her head. Tonguing the wound.

Slipping inside the memory of Chloe and simply _being_. 

*

Exist inside of someone, and it's almost like they're there with you. Breathing inside you. Whispering at the back of your head, but with memories she doesn't have to listen.

She can press into the wound without any repercussions or qualms of conscience. 

Except that it doesn't heal.

*

Some of Chloe's memories are like a bruise somewhere in the muscle layer of her mind, too deep to repair. Too sharp to forget.

They sneak up on her at the strangest times.

Dressing to go above deck in the early morning, still blinking sleep from her eyes, or knife in hand when she's gutting that day's dinner. Watching the rail at dawn or in the black of night.

Pulling in to dock, with the rope almost slipping loose against her calloused hands, but Beca flexes her grip and thinks of how the frosting had tickled Chloe's nose when blowing out her birthday candles at age three.

*

(Or remembering how Chloe had felt the first time _they_ had kissed.

How her mind had been completely blank except for only _yes_ and then -- even louder -- _finally_.)

*

Sometimes she wonders what memories of hers are buried deep inside Chloe.

(Wonders if Chloe remembers her at all.)

But Jesse is through the door close behind her, slipping his shoes and jacket off in one single movement and pulling Beca toward the warmth of the bed in the back. 

She forgets to wonder.

For now, she (almost) forgets completely.

*

(But only almost. Only until.)

*

Maybe there is a god left after all, and maybe he cares. 

Because Beca could have been out there on the ocean when it happens. It could have been a night when they left the radio off, or a storm could have kept them above deck and checking on the rigging.

But she's in Jesse's arms, half-asleep, when the news breaks through the static of the airwaves.

Seattle is nearly in ruins. 

_Vengeful Kraken_ has gone down, sinking beneath the waves.

So has her crew.

_No word yet on its two pilots_ , they're saying. _Death toll expected to be at least three hundred thousand._

*

It could have happened anytime or anywhere. 

She could have been away from the shore, and might not have made it back until it was too late.

It might be that anyway.

But she's already in the car, cursing the ignition and striking the wheel with the heel of her palm, as Jesse shouts her name from the doorway. 

She doesn't look back. 

He gets close to the car -- nearly reaching for the handle -- when she peels off in a shower of slush and snow, but she hardly notices him stumbling back. 

Her eyes are trained on the road and her mind is directed toward Seattle.

Reaching out through the empty hole inside of her, across the darkness and the miles, in search of that ghost of a connection she has been wishing into silence for the past several months. 

Desperate for even just a whisper in the dark.


	3. Chapter 3

The man waiting at the ticket counter at the airport isn't Pentecost. 

In fact, Beca has never seen him before; but she knows right away that he's PPDC.

Must be the condescending jut of his jaw.

"Miss Mitchell," he's saying, but she brushes right past his extended hand. 

"Did you buy the tickets?" 

She's so busy screaming into the silence inside her own head, it actually takes a minute to remember that she has to speak aloud. When she does, it's clear from the way he cringes that it must have come out several degrees louder than necessary.

It's hard to care.

Beca has spent the past year trying to tune out the voice inside, but now she's reaching out, in search of Chloe's wavelength. Like radio static when you're too far out at sea.

Except Beca's not the one who--

*

The flight is too long. 

In a timeline where just a few minutes already feels like an eternity, the three hour flight is impossibly long.

Apparently PPDC's ever diminishing budget no longer allows for anything but shitty commercial flights -- at least as far as piloting program rejects go -- and the stewardess pretty clearly has something against Beca's attitude, or whatever. 

She's already been by twice to make sure that everything is stowed fully beneath the seat back in front of her, even though Beca brought _literally nothing_ on board.

Except for the jacket in the overhead bin and the hoodie she stole from Chloe during the first week of training.

It doesn't smell like her anymore, but it had. For a while.

She doesn't own anything that smells like Chloe anymore. Pretty sure she wouldn't even be able to place the scent.

Some days, she's not even sure she remembers Chloe's voice.

Those are the days without the radio broadcasts or the interviews. Those are days when the images in dreams are just that. Flashes. Quick flickering reflections of memory. Distorted and out of focus.

*

(But close her eyes and she can see her. Clear as day. Almost warm and real. Solid as something you could reach out to touch.

Almost.

But the sound in her head isn't real. Just a memory. Not--)

*

The guy they assigned is clean cut and quiet. He tries making small talk like it's something he learned to do to put witnesses at ease. 

Beca grips the seat tighter and tries not to take all the rage building up inside of her out on this kid. He clearly means well. He offered her a Tic-Tac and everything.

When the stewardess tried to start shit over the hoodie in Beca's lap, he gently interjected to mention that she could just put it on instead of parting with it. It must be all that military training or whatever that gave him such a strong handle on body language so that he could tell right away how Beca basically wanted to strangle the woman with one of those easy to fasten seat belts.

*

Mystery really why the stewardess doesn't like her.

*

There aren't any bags waiting for her when they land in Seattle. What would she care for enough to carry with her from one life to the next? Enough baggage comes along already.

The nice guy with the fresh breath and the perfect haircut must have brought something along, though, because he heads straight for baggage claim without ever looking back. He walks with that straight and solid conviction of someone who is used to following protocol and proceeding forward in an orderly fashion.

Probably will be genuinely surprised when he turns to find Beca no longer behind him.

It's hard to care.

*

Maybe the only thing Fresh Breath had said in the course of 194 minutes that Beca bothered to retain was the name of the hospital they're keeping Chloe in.

Something about it had been reassuring. She's still _somewhere_.

Present tense.

*

Even if she's not picking up on her end. Just a dial tone.

* 

This time Pentecost is there, which means he must have grabbed an earlier flight out of Alaska.

Of course.

He would have been informed the moment the tide had turned against Vengeful Kraken. He would have been on the first direct flight out. 

Without her.

Beca had only been an after thought. Probably expected to feel grateful that she had been thought of at all.

But she's not feeling particularly thankful for anything at the moment.

"How is she?"

Beca actually thinks it's pretty impressive she manages to regulate the volume of her voice this time, even if Pentecost and the guy he was in the middle of a conversation with both send her a look of mild displeasure.

Whatever.

"How _is_ she?" she asks again, like maybe they're both just fucking slow. "Chloe."

The name feels wrong in her mouth. Like an old wound reopened and bleeding, forming puddles on the floor.

Like long nights spent whispering together in bed.

"She's alive," he says, speaking in that grave voice reserved for potentially terrible news. "We think she'll wake up."

Wake up.

*

It hadn't occurred to Beca that there could be something worse than death.

She was too busy imagining Chloe dragged underneath the waves, never to surface again, to picture the possibility of a lifetime spent with tubes and wires plugged into her. Heartbeat maintained by a machine.

*

The wait is longer than three hours.

*

(Their first week Drifting, the pain of separation is almost immeasurable.

Just calling it _pain_ doesn't feel sufficient. It isn't anything physical.

It isn't _only_ physical.

Stand in the ocean long enough and the sand will sink beneath you, dragged away one grain at a time. 

But if you have become a part of both the waves and sand, where does that leave you after high tide?

Some pilots lose themselves to the process. Some just end up lost.

Beca was somewhere in between. 

She could slip inside Chloe's thoughts so fast and deep it was like she tasted her own come on the roof of her mouth, mixed in with memories of butterscotch ice cream and late nights driving with wind in her hair -- _no, Chloe's hair_ \-- but there were recesses deep inside herself where Chloe would not look too long.

You aren't meant to feel shame. It interferes with the act of assimilation. Two becoming one. Naked and exposed to each other.

Mentally, but sometimes physically too. 

That part she didn't mind. Beca didn't need to turn out the lights before loosening one button, then another, and she didn't mind the way Chloe's hands would drift -- that word again, _drifting_ \-- along her back, teasing over each notch of her spine. She could drag her mouth over Chloe's breast, hair mussed, and fall asleep nuzzled at her shoulder.

No shame.

But there are some memories you hold close to yourself, even without trying. Some shades of yourself are kept dim, even under direct light, and maybe that's for the best. 

Beca never pulled back, but perhaps she stiffened. Maybe it was just that she never spoke of such things -- in bed or in the Drift -- and maybe that was enough. She never asked for these things to be kept hidden, but Chloe kept her distance from certain expanses of Beca's self.

Inside the Drift, you are meant to be fully exposed, always open, but it was Chloe who held the curtain closed. Hiding the parts of Beca that were afraid to be seen.

Maybe that was something close to love.)

*

She listens closely to the things the techs say about biology and brain waves moving in intersecting patterns. She doesn't understand even half of it, but it makes more sense to her than Chloe's explanations.

"Heartbeats are rhythmic too, you know," she'll say lightly, fingers tracing down the pulse in Beca's wrist.

(Except when they're inside the Drift. Then everything Chloe says makes sense.

Then she's the only thing that makes sense.)

Something they never tell you is how leaving the Drift can feel like peeling your skin back, one inch at a time.

Not just skin.

What's the word for what's just on the inside? What do you call the part of you right beneath fragile flesh -- and why does it feel sometimes like Chloe can reach it with just the slightest touch on the surface?

One touch ignites. Reminds her she's still there somehow. They're both still inside themselves instead of back in that machine.

Or only alive inside of each other.

*

Seatbelt on, so at least that's a start. 

Trying to remember the exact angle the manual says to place your hands at. Adjusting the rearview one too many times, but she catches her face in the reflection, and she's smiling. 

A smile so big -- and nervous -- she can't see anything else for a moment.

People have told her all of her life, her smile is blinding. She's not sure she knew what that meant until now. (She's not sure that _she_ is the one who knows it.)

She's not sure whose head this is. Whose hands on the wheel.

*

Water roars.

Everyone says that. It's a cliche.

You hear it a million times in your lifetime and it means nothing. One of those things you never think about until you hear it snarling, clattering, smashing up the side of something big and metal -- but man-made -- echoing all around you, and you _know_.

And then you don't think silly small words like _roar_ , because it's not enough for that vibrating feeling of terror inside your chest. The way the metal feels like it's going to give way under your feet. 

It groans. Metal groans and water roars, and none of it is enough for the cold dread clenching inside you. 

Nothing compares to the aching pain in your teeth when your jaw sets tight and you can't release it again. 

Maybe you shouldn't.

If you did, you might not stop screaming.

*

Did that memory belong to her, or did it come from the other room?

(Something about two sources of energy brought into close proximity. Charging each other. Conducting.)

*

Does it matter?

*

(If Chloe's mind still has memories, that's a good sign. 

Or a sign of something.

It _has_ to mean something, and so it matters.

Matters more than almost anything ever has.)

*

They give you your choice of prayers.

Here's a helpful list. 

Others have found these moving. 

They'll laminate the one you choose, like you might want to hang it up on your fridge some day. Safe, sterile pictures underneath. A lamb -- innocent, sweet, non-sacrificial -- or a bridge leading only God knows where. (Literally.) 

Two hands clasped in prayer.

Not that it did anyone any good. Hell still opened up. We're still being swallowed whole.

Just some of us more slowly than others. 

She wonders if the process is normally longer, more intimate. With so many funerals forced into such a short span of time, it's possible changes were made.

It's possible you don't usually run into another family walking in as you walk out. Everyone politely avoiding eye contact, trying not to notice red eyes or the tracks of tears.

Putting so much effort into pretending we don't see another person's pain.

That we don't have our own.

* 

They say that people come together in times of crisis.

One thing we all learned is how to ignore each other tactfully. Just keep your head down and avoid the messy business of overlapping emotions and concern. 

The next level is being able to imagine you can't see your own problems either.

Grip the curtain closed so tight your knuckles turn white.

(Or maybe that's just Beca.)

*

Food in the mess hall isn't always awful. It's nothing like home cooking -- just like mom used to make or whatever -- but Beca's been making a concentrated effort for eight years to forget as many details of the past life with her family as she can.

Maybe that counts as closure.

The food isn't great, but it's not as bad as the stuff they force feed you in hospitals. (Better than processed protein through a tube.) She's not sure why she's thinking that, but--

*

The food isn't the point. It's the company.

Space is limited everywhere at The Icebox, but especially in the dining hall where the trays rest edge to edge and people barely have room for both elbows. Learn to eat with one hand resting in your lap, arm stiff and at your side.

Or alternatively, slip that hand onto someone else's knee. Share the space.

Times of great crisis and tragedy bring us all so much closer together, and Chloe is exemplary at illustrating the point. 

She plucks Beca's hand like gently picking a flower, twisting around and around her fingers like petals. _She loves me, she loves me not,_ and her thumb beats out a brief rhythm across each knuckle.

Beca can't help but feel the beat too.

(Even though they never talk about that. The music somewhere buried inside Beca's head -- snatches of sound she recognizes Chloe humming sometimes when she thinks no one (even Beca) is listening -- and how they both know where the music comes from. 

But also why it stopped.)

"I'm not hungry," Chloe says, fingers winding around Beca's. She still makes a habit of talking aloud in public spaces, even when it isn't necessary. Even outside the Drift, they know how to read each other's bodies. Each shade of Chloe's smile clear as a fucking mood ring.

Still, it weirds other people out sometimes, this silence that's so easy to slip into, with just the sound of spoons scrapping over plates -- meatloaf and mashed potatoes -- to break it up. You could disappear inside that if you linger for too long.

Start to feel transparent. Not all there.

(Not at all there.)

So Beca says, "Me either," and thinks how long Chloe's fingers are. 

Even though she knows. She already knows thoroughly -- _deeply_ \-- and it makes her smile in this sharp way that Chloe must be able to read -- of course she can -- because somehow she finds just enough room for _that_ elbow to Beca's side.

_Don't_ , she says, without having to say.

Gentle and chiding, but almost drowsy.

*

All those times sitting too close -- holding eye contact too long -- when her mind would drift to somewhere else.

She never _needed_ the lights out in bed, but they so often were.

Beca never asked for Chloe to turn or look away, but she so often did.

*

_Beca, don't._

*

She must have dozed off because when she lifts her head suddenly (sharply), it's stiff and strained.

But that isn't the pain throbbing behind her temple.

That's--

Beca is on her feet without thinking. 

Because this is somewhere beyond thinking. 

Faster than that, which is why the guard -- hello again, Fresh Breath -- standing watch outside Chloe's door isn't ready to stop her in time.

Not that he'd be able to.

Because that's Chloe's frequency pinging behind her eyeballs, and Chloe's suddenly wide -- and oh so terrified -- eyes trained on the doorway.

Chloe's mouth moving as if to speak, but she doesn't.

No need.

Even outside the Drift, Beca only has to look once to hear her screaming.


End file.
